’Max̱wa̱yalidzi, K’odi Nelson, is the Executive Director and visionary founder of Nawalakw Community Foundation
What Does Nawalakw Mean?
When people hear the word Nawalakw, they often ask, “What does it mean?” Although the english translation is “supernatural,” K’odi Nelson, founder and Executive Director of Nawalakw, believes the word carries a much deeper meaning than any english translation can fully capture.
As we bring back K’odi’s Korner, we wanted to start at the beginning. Before talking about programs, projects, or what’s ahead, we sat down with K’odi to ask a simple question:
What does Nawalakw mean to you?
For K’odi, Nawalakw represents the highest and purest form of energy that comes through our connection to the land, our ancestors, our language, our culture, and our spirit. It’s something that is difficult to explain, but many people have felt it, whether standing in the Big House, spending time on the land, or reconnecting with the places and teachings that have sustained our people for generations.
The vision for Nawalakw was born during one of the most difficult periods of K’odi’s life. While seeking healing and reflecting on his own journey, he realized that the greatest source of strength he had ever known was his connection to culture. That realization became the foundation for a much bigger question:
How do we create that same foundation for future generations?
That question became the beginning of Nawalakw.
What started as an idea has grown into a movement focused on reconnecting Kwakwa̱ka̱ʼwakw people with their language and culture, their lands, and one another. Every language camp, every youth program, every Elder’s teaching, and every step forward is guided by a purpose:
creating a better future for our children and the children yet unborn.
As K’odi often says, this work has never been about one person. It has always been about ensuring the next generation grows up knowing who they are, where they come from, and the responsibilities they carry to care for one another and for our territories.
In the resurface of K’odi’s Korner, K’odi shares the story behind Nawalakw, the experiences that shaped its vision, and why reconnecting to language, land, and culture continues to guide everything we do.
Read the interview below.
K’odi with his parents, Tidi and Hank
Interview with K’odi Nelson
Q: What does Nawalakw mean, and what does it mean to you?
A: That’s a big question.
The name Nawalakw was chosen when we were looking for a word from our language that could capture the vision and purpose of what we hoped this organization would become. Nawalakw refers to the highest, purest form of energy that comes from a higher place. In english, it’s difficult to translate because there isn’t a direct equivalent. People often think of it as something supernatural, but it’s more than that.
It’s the feeling you’ve probably experienced in the Big House. It’s an energy that doesn’t come from us alone. It comes from our connection to our land, our people, our history, and our spirit. It’s the highest form of energy that we can tap into.
When we were thinking about the work we wanted to do for our people, Nawalakw felt like the right name because it reflected everything we were striving toward. On personal level, Nawalakw has become my life.
On a personal level, Nawalakw has become my life.
The idea for the organization came during one of the darkest periods of my life. I began to realize how few places truly supported people dealing with intergenerational trauma through culture. I started thinking about the need for more culturally grounded healing spaces.
That was when the vision for Nawalakw began to take shape.
As I reflected on my own life, I realized that my greatest source of strength had always been my culture and my connection to my people. If I hadn’t had that foundation, I probably would have continued searching for something to fill a void that was already there. My culture had always been there, I just needed to recognize it.
That realization made me wonder how we could create opportunities for young people to build that same foundation. How could we help them develop strength through culture before they reached the struggles that so many of us have experienced?
Sometimes our greatest ideas come during our hardest moments. For me, they came when I was searching for change and looking for something greater than myself.
Around that same time, I was teaching in Port Hardy and taking students out on the land. Every time we spent five days together in our territory, I saw incredible changes in the young people. Those experiences stayed with me. I knew there was something powerful about land-based wellness, even if I didn’t yet know exactly what it would become.
I was also working as a guide with Sea Wolf Adventures, and I saw firsthand what it did for our own people to spend time in our territory while sharing it with visitors. Every day, we were telling the stories of who we are and where we come from. It made us feel proud, connected, and grounded.
All of those experiences came together to shape the vision for what Nawalakw could become: a place centered on wellness, language, culture, and reconnecting people with the land.
Today, Nawalakw means everything to me. It gives me a reason to wake up every morning.
But this has never been about me.
It has always been about our children, and the children yet unborn.
My Late Uncle Frank often spoke about “our children and the children yet unborn.” Almost every speech he gave included those words, and they’ve stayed with me ever since.
Now I think about them every single day.
Everything we do is driven by one question: Can we create a better tomorrow for our children, and for the generations that follow?
First Annual Fish Camp lax̱ Hada
Q: What’s coming next for Nawalakw, and what are you most looking forward to?
A: There are a lot of exciting things happening.
First, we’re continuing the language revitalization work that has become such an important part of our organization. We’re incredibly proud to have created the Language Nest in Alert Bay, and this September we’d like to expand it into kindergarten. The goal is to add one grade level each year over the next seven years until we have a full immersion school.
For a long time, our people have dreamed about having an immersion school, but we never had a clear pathway to make it happen. Now, for the first time, I truly believe we do. We’ve built momentum, and we’re learning from Nations that have already been successful, including schools in Saanich and Duncan. Rather than reinventing the wheel, we’re asking, “What can we learn from them, and how can we apply those lessons here in our own territory?”
That’s something I’m really excited about because it finally feels achievable.
We’re also dreaming about the next phase of Nawalakw: an adult wellness facility in our territory.
From the beginning, we’ve imagined it as more than just a wellness centre. We want it to be financially sustainable by creating its own source of revenue.
The idea is to build a wellness destination that welcomes visitors while supporting our community. You could call it wellness tourism, but it’s really tourism with a social purpose. The revenue it generates would go directly back into language revitalization, cultural programming, and wellness initiatives for our people.
That vision has always been part of Nawalakw. We want to create our own economy that supports our own healing.
I think that idea is what inspired many of the philanthropists who believed in us during the early years. They weren’t just supporting another program. They were supporting the idea that language and culture revitalization could eventually sustain itself through a social venture model.
We’re continuing to put a lot of energy into shaping what that second phase could become.
Another priority is expanding wellness programming for adults.
Ever since we started Hada, people have asked, “What about the adults?” Healing isn’t only something children need. There are many adults in our communities who are seeking wellness and who deserve opportunities to reconnect with culture and the land as well.
That’s another area I’m excited to continue developing.
We’re also seeing new partnerships emerge. Nations from across the country have been visiting us to learn about what we’re doing. They aren’t coming to copy us, they’re coming to be inspired and to think about what something similar could look like in their own territories.
To me, that’s incredibly meaningful.
I truly believe our own people hold the knowledge needed for our own healing.
Our traditional teachings, values, language, and ways of knowing will always be at the heart of that healing. Professionals from outside our communities can certainly play an important role, but they are only one piece of the picture.
The greatest healing will come from our own people, sharing our own knowledge and reconnecting our communities to who we are.
That’s what we believe, and that’s what gives us hope for the future.
K’odi sharing a story with the youth at Hada
Q: What do you want people to know about Nawalakw, and why is this work so important right now?
A: I want people to know that there is something incredibly powerful about bringing our people back to our territories.
There is healing in reconnecting with the places our ancestors lived, travelled, and cared for. That connection is what helps restore us.
For generations, our people were removed from our lands. We were confined to reserves and disconnected from our territories, our resources, our histories, and our origin stories. That separation had lasting impacts on our communities.
When we return to our territories, something changes. We begin to understand ourselves in a deeper way. We reconnect with who we are, where we come from, and the responsibilities we carry.
That’s why this work is so important.
At the same time, our territories need us.
We can’t protect our lands if we’re not present on them.
When our people aren’t there, outside industries and outside interests are free to make decisions about places they don’t have the same relationship with.
By creating a stronger presence in our territories, we strengthen our ability to protect them for future generations.
One of the ideas I’ve joked about is putting #OccupyYourTerritory on a T-shirt, but there’s real meaning behind it.
It’s about encouraging our people to spend time on the land, to build, gather, learn, teach, and reconnect. There are cultural reasons for that, there are wellness reasons for that, and there are political reasons for that. In order to fully grasp and continue to learn our language we will need to be out on the land. The land is where our language comes from.
These are our lands.
We never lost them through war. We never signed them away. They have always been our territories, and we need to live in a way that reflects that understanding.
When we return to our territories, stewardship naturally follows.
We begin to understand that caring for the land isn’t someone else’s responsibility, it’s ours.
Our origin stories teach us that certain mountains, rivers, islands, and places belong to particular families or clans, not as possessions, but as responsibilities. Those stories remind us that we each have a role in caring for the places we come from.
That knowledge is incredibly empowering.
These teachings have existed for thousands of years. They can’t be fully understood in a classroom or from a book. They have to be experienced by being on the land itself.
That’s where people truly begin to understand who they are.
Our relationship with the land is reciprocal.
When we spend time in our territories, the land heals us, but we also bring healing back to the land. We care for it, protect it, and ensure it remains healthy for the generations that follow.
That’s what Nawalakw is really about.
It’s about helping people reconnect with themselves, reconnect with their territories, and reconnect with the responsibilities that have always been ours. Reconnecting to that higher energy that is Nawalakw.
That’s where healing begins.
K’odi with his with Alisha and two sons, Dallas and Zayden
